


Everything caught underfoot

by hellokerry



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Political Campaigns, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 17:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4230534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellokerry/pseuds/hellokerry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during Bartlet's second campaign. Donna is feeling introspective. Josh hands her a lifeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything caught underfoot

**Author's Note:**

> I once read a fic where Donna's ex-boyfriend was named Carl and I loved it so much that it basically became my canon. I can't remember the name of the fic, or the writer, but I want to give inspiration props where they are due.

It's raining, and they're driving through some small midwestern town where the fields stretch so far into the distance that Donna almost feels like she's home. She grew up in a city, but on weekends she'd hitch a ride with her friends, or Carl, or whoever was around and head out into the country that sprawled in every direction outside the four walls of her parents' condo. She met a farm boy once while camping at Devil's Lake, drunk on some peppermint schnapps that her friend had swiped from some unnamed relative, and she had briefly entertained a life of crops to harvest amidst white linens drying outside an even whiter house, green and sunlight surrounding everything, surrounding her, and she told herself he tasted like the earth when she kissed him against a tree that night and wondered, oddly, if he drove a tractor. He told her he'd take her to Iowa as if it were some golden land of opportunity and she sighed against his neck as his calloused fingers crept up her shirt. She woke up that morning with a splitting headache and his arm wrapped around her waist, a sour taste in her mouth as she stumbled back to her tent.

They're in Iowa now, she thinks, as rain splatters against the window of the bus and she leans her head against it. She wonders where that boy is now. She wonders why she can't remember his name, thinks it might have been Joe. Or maybe Tom? Something with three letters, definitely, though what does it matter now. She didn't go to Iowa with him and she didn't become a farmer's wife. She didn't become much of anything, really - she met Carl at UW-Madison and gave up her life before she was ever able to figure out what it really was.

Donna remembers standing at a bus stop, Carl parked next to her, and he is yelling out his passenger side window as the rain pours down. Her hair is plastered against her face and he doesn't offer her an umbrella, or even the opportunity to dry off inside his car. They've said some horrible things to one another in the last few hours - the last few years - and she's trying to drown him out by wondering if her cast is supposed to get this wet (it's not) and if she has enough money to fix her break lines and get her car back to New Hampshire (she does). She's wondering why she ever thought this was a good idea when all he's ever made her feel was inadequate, the college dropout waiting to marry up and out of her own misfortunes.

Carl once told her in the middle of a heated argument that he could do so much better. That she didn't deserve him. She thought he was full of shit, but it didn't lessen the pain of knowing he felt that way, deep down, even when he was kissing her neck and calling her baby.

She knows he felt that way when she told him she was leaving him. He yelled it at her even as he chased her out of the house, trying to force her back in. He felt that way when he slept with that woman from med school two years ago and Donna never tells him, but it eats her up inside to know he didn't respect her enough to say no. He cried when he finally told her and she had let him apologize, her heart pounding through her chest, why me, why me, why me?

Sometimes she still feels like that young, naive girl, drunk on love and the false promise of a future, and it makes her want to rip the veins out of her body to stop the flow of blood to her foolish heart.

She hears Josh shift in the seat behind her and wishes, not for the first time, that everything would just stop.

"Hey," he says, poking his head in between the seats. "You okay?"

Carl didn't respect her enough to say no, but maybe she was just leading by example, staying with a good for nothing cheat who wanted nothing from her in the end except her money and the regularity of sex and a home cooked meal, who didn't want her love and certainly did not want to give his in return.

He told her he could do better. It never occurred to Donna at the time that she could too.

"Donna?"

Josh is sitting next to her now and she realizes as she picks her head up and stares into his slightly concerned face that she hadn't bothered to answer him.

"Yeah. Sorry." She shakes her head, flashes him a reassuring smile. "Just thinking."

"You usually tell me that's dangerous," he says and bumps his shoulder lightly against hers, "and I'm inclined to believe you're right this time. You look… not okay."

He rests a hand on her forearm and this, she thinks, this is what she doesn't get about them. This is the entire problem, because her boss is noticing things when he should just be leaving her alone and his fingertips feel warm where they rest on her skin. His body is so close she can feel the exhaustion that rolls off of him from the weeks of non-stop campaigning and late nights in small town bars where he buys her drinks and jokes about clandestine meetings in motels with fake names (he jokes until it isn't a joke, until it's just a dull pain inside of her chest and she wakes up in her own bed with a sour taste in her mouth, wondering what it would feel like to have his arm wrapped around her waist).

"I'm just tired, I guess," she sighs, and then, because he is looking at her with a sincerity that instantly reminds Donna of a line he wrote inside her book - _You make it all worthwhile and I don’t tell you that enough_ \- she decides to give him a thread of honesty. "Thinking about home and just… you know, feeling sorry for myself unnecessarily. I think it's the weather. I'll be okay."

She's thinking about home and about Carl who tried to take everything from her and almost succeeded and then she's thinking about Josh, his face bursting with possibility from day one and he has always trusted her and respected her in a deep, revealing way that most of the men in her life have not, even the good ones. Josh who shouts at her from his office and always remembers her birthday even as he pretends to never remember his own mother's, who would never tell her she wasn't worth it even if he was furious. Even when she left him for a piece of shit ex-boyfriend in Madison and then came crawling back.

Josh, who squeezes her arm with a reassuring smile. "Just tell me who's ass I need to kick, okay?"

Donna laughs. Josh smiles.

On Monday, they're back in the office and he walks her home, taking a detour down the Mall. He argues with her about a bill they're trying to pass and takes her opinion so seriously that it hurts, and Donna can't help but think of all the ways he's completely changed her life, or how this type of hero worship is dangerous. She wants to kiss him there in the shadow of the Washington Monument, to hell with four more years, because he is walking too close to her, brushing his arm up against hers and looking at her like she hung the moon and this has to stop, she thinks. This has to stop.

(In a few months he will be giving her that same look, calling her an idiot and telling her she's beautiful in the middle of fallen snow, and while she's loved him feverishly for all this time, she's beginning to wonder if he has too.)


End file.
